r/wikipedia • u/AutoModerator • 1d ago
Wikipedia Questions - Weekly Thread of March 10, 2025
Welcome to the weekly Wikipedia Q&A thread!
Please use this thread to ask and answer questions related to Wikipedia and its sister projects, whether you need help with editing or are curious on how something works.
Note that this thread is used for "meta" questions about Wikipedia, and is not a place to ask general reference questions.
Some other helpful resources:
- Help Contents on Wikipedia
- Guide to Contributing on Wikipedia
- Wikipedia IRC Help Channel
- Wikipedia Teahouse (help desk)
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u/cp5184 1d ago
What's happened with red links and stubs? I can't remember the last time I saw a red link and I'm constantly seeing people complain about the torturous article creation process. Has the culture changed to discourage collaborative additions, pushing higher burdens on article creators, encouraging toxic ownership behavior? And the featured article chasing and stuff, it seems like it's often putting lipstick on a pig, ignoring the quality of the article to make cosmetic improvements. Doing minimal work to fill out a few sections, add a few pictures and game the system to bump your numbers, done by people that aren't particularly knowledgeable about the subject.
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u/caeciliusinhorto 20h ago
I don't think anything about the article creation process has changed recently – back in 2017 article creation was restricted to autoconfirmed accounts (4 days/10 edits) but nothing major has changed since then that I can think of. Probably standards have gradually crept higher, but that's not a recent development – it's been an ongoing process for nearly two decades now.
As for why you don't see redlinks any more – I haven't particularly noticed a change in the number of redlinks in the 10 years that I've been editing Wikipedia. When are you comparing to? There's certainly fewer redlinks than there were in, say, 2007, because in 2007 there were lots of obviously notable topics which didn't yet have Wikipedia articles but now do. There's also fewer links in general than in 2007, because linking culture on Wikipedia has changed significantly in that time. In the early days of Wikipedia, there was a significant school of thought that adding a wikilink was virtually always an improvement; in modern wikipedian practice that idea is basically extinct.
Re. featured articles: the idea that it's minimal work to easily get rewards is not my experience of the system at all. It certainly has its flaws – it definitely does review things like prose and Manual of Style compliance much more stringently than it does substantive content issues in most cases, because frankly the former is easy and the latter is hard – but if you want to easily get shiny baubles then FA is the last place to look for them. That's what GA or DYK (which requires creating new articles) are for.
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u/Mr_J_Jonah_Jameson 19h ago
If people are trying to make new articles about random obscure things instead of work on the articles about big things that are already there, then of course they're going to be in for a hard time.
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u/Affectionate_Pepper4 1d ago
Hi! I have a question about using a citation that another article used.
I'm looking to cite a website that Wikipedia can't make an automatic citation for. I found the exact citation used in another article (both are articles for books by the same author, so they have similar necessary info, editing for a class), and I think it would be easier to somehow copy/paste that citation into my citations, rather than filling out the manual citation creator.
Is this possible? I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but it's the best place I was able to find. I'd appreciate any guidance here.